Great video. I don’t have any children myself, but a wonderful niece that just turned 5. Spent a lot of time with her as an infant and once she started to crawl, well it was like the “end of the world.” Never know something so small could move so fast on all fours.

You turn your head for a few seconds and she was off to gosh knows where. Quickly there was enough baby gates in the house travel through said house was even hindered for adults.

“Joe Scarborough was a rock star this weekend,” said Republican New Hampshire state Rep. Joseph Sweeney. “He energized the crowd.”

WTF is it with Rethuglicans calling their flash-in-the-pan potential candidates and/or their wives “rock stars”? Don’t they know that if you have to tell people someone is a rock star, it’s pretty obvious that they’re not one? (to paraphrase Tywin Lannister)

Sadly, my niece and nephew who are geographically closest to me were both born with clubfeet, so there wasn’t a real crawling stage (they have to get surgery and/or braces very early on, which tends to impair their forward mobility). My nephew figured out he could lay on his back and scoot that way, which meant that he had a bald spot on the back of his head for, like, a year.

@Mnemosyne:
My cousin and both my nephews were born with club feet. Cousin was in plaster casts and horrible leg braces for years. He still has major foot problems, although they didn’t keep him out of ’Nam.

Both nephews had countless surgeries from infancy through about age 12-14. There’s still some serious deformity, but they cope very well. They lived on the other side of the country, so I never saw them growing up and have no idea what effect it had on their crawling.

She is 100% adorable! Just remember Erma Bombeck’s famous line: “We spend the first two years of our childrens’ lives teaching them to walk and talk; we spend the next 18 telling them to sit down and shut up. Happy parenting!

I’m impressed. When my daughter tried to crawl in a dress, she got her knees caught over the hem and pulled the dress so taut she couldn’t move and would either roll over or just stop and cry. But then, she’s still kind of a klutz to this day.

Ah, yes, crawling – nature’s way of telling you that it’s time: (1) to really clean the floor, (2) to child-proof the electrical outlets and remove all breakable or sharp objects at or below waist level, and (3) to get those gates in place on the stairs.
Optional: if it’s your first, you can also go ahead and pad all the sharp corners on furniture.
ETA: Beautiful child, btw.

@SiubhanDuinne: “what effect it had on their crawling. ”
My parents tell me I was mostly ‘crawling’ with hands and feet rather than hands and knees. I have surprisingly flexible hips 50 some years later.

There’s a totally new non-surgical technique they can do that uses braces and physical therapy. Unfortunately, it came along after my niece had her first surgery, so she was no longer eligible, but they did it for my nephew with great success.

I have a cousin who was born with a hip problem and was in a cast and brace for about a year and a half. Man, could that little boy move when he crawled. Crawled forward, dragging the braced legs with him.

You really should replace all outlets with tamper-proof models anyway. They’re simultaneously easier to get a plug into, harder to get something else into, and less likely to be accidentally uncovered than ordinary outlets with those “child-proof” covers on them. That’s why the electrical code mandates them for essentially all the same kinds of outlets that you’d normally child-proof the other way.

@Roger Moore: I did not know that, thank you. Of course, my kiddies are aged 7 and above, so those days are behind me and, let’s be honest, I’m not going to undertake such a project at this point. Perhaps Tim will feel differently.

@Roger Moore: Never have heard of a child sticking something in an outlet although I’m sure there are horror stories but that would jolt and throw them back. Many kids and pets like to chew on lamp cords which is much more dangerous because of the wet mouth and it burns lips and tongues.

@mak:
Replacing the actual outlets is surprisingly easy, provided that the rest of the electrical system is vaguely modern (e.g. new enough that there is a reliable grounding connection). Tamper resistant outlets are as little as $1.50 each, and less than that if you buy a 10 pack. For somebody who fancies themselves a handyman, it would be a pretty easy project.

Never have heard of a child sticking something in an outlet although I’m sure there are horror stories but that would jolt and throw them back

I’ve heard about it. My impression is that it’s generally slightly older kids who do it: ones who are old enough to plan but not old enough to realize they’re doing something dangerous. Those ones are unlikely to be deterred by those little outlet blockers, but they may be stopped by tamper-resistant outlets, which have shutters that won’t open unless something is going into both the hot and neutral side of the outlet at the same time.

@Fuzzy: Hmm, there was the time I taught myself electricity with a couple of oven mitts, two lengths of copper wire and a plastic cup. I would test the conductivity of liquids by putting one end of each wire in the socket and the other ends in the cup. Conductive liquids would short out the kitchen. When that happened I would go to the basement, pull a chair up to the fuse box and throw the breaker. As I recall my folks warrantied a digital clock so many times that they got blacklisted from the Sharper Image.

I was a precocious middle schooler.

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